Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

“We’re on kind of a schedule here, Charlie.”

But he ducked into a pizzeria toilet with a FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY! sign. With the door locked, he stripped off his pants and pajama bottoms, wadded the bottoms into his jacket pocket, and put the pants back on. The counter guy glared as he made his way back outside.

“You know, if you’re going to be like this …,” she started.

“Like what?”

“Like this. I can feel you like beaming anxiety at me. And would you pay attention? You’re blocking the sidewalk.”

As indeed, he saw, he was. The crosstown blocks, West Village to East, were jumping with tourists and freaks and other NYU kids. But when had she ever cared about courtesy? “Sam, I feel like you’re pissed off at me, and I didn’t even do anything.”

“What is it you want from me, Charlie?”

“I don’t want anything,” he said, dangerously close to whining. “You called me, remember? I just want to be buds again.”

She thought about this for a second. If there had been some sign he could have given her, one of the recondite handshakes of third graders, spitting in a palm, inscribing a cross, he would have done it. “Okay,” she said, “but let’s just get where we’re going, can we?”

Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery, its columned portico swimming with graffiti she would once have insisted on photographing. The line spilled out of a side door, and they took their place at the back, under an erratic streetlight. A safety pin winked at Charlie from the face of a tall guy a dozen spots ahead; he resembled an ogreish friend of Sam’s he’d met once, not far from here. Charlie became conscious of his hat. He wanted to take it off before the guy, if it was the guy, could spot them, but the light had cut out. When it buzzed back on, he nudged Sam. “Hey, don’t you know him?”

She looked around edgily. “Who?” But the safety pin had been swallowed by the building, and her gaze fell on another man, the size and shape of an industrial refrigerator, who opened and closed the steel fire door without appearing to see the people passing through it. “Oh, that’s just Bullet.” She seemed almost to collect these obscure connections with older men. This one was heavily tattooed — blades of black ink that extended from his neck all the way out onto his toffee-brown face, like warpaint — and dressed head to toe in leather, with an earring shaped like a shiv. “He’s the bouncer.”

“I don’t have an ID,” Charlie hissed.

“What do you need ID for? Just be cool. Follow my lead.”

He tugged the fur hat down over his eyes and forced himself to stop slouching. His efforts to look grown-up turned out not to matter; the bouncer was lifting Sam off the ground in a bear-hug, his face splitting into a broad, pink grin. “I thought we weren’t going to see you tonight, sugar.”

“Places to go, people to see,” she said. “You know how it is.”

“Who’s the beanpole?” He nodded in Charlie’s direction without looking at him.

“This is Charles.”

“Charles looks like a narc in that hat.”

“Charles is cool. Say hello, Charles.”

Charlie mumbled something but didn’t put his hand out. He was a little scared of black people in general, and in particular of this man who, if he’d taken the notion, could have snapped Charlie over his knee like kindling. If indeed he was black and not super-swarthy, or Turkish or something — the tattoos made it hard to tell.

“Listen,” Sam said, leaning in. “Has anybody been asking for me?”

“For you?”

“Yeah, like … did someone ask you was I here? Preppy guy? Good-looking? Thirtyish? A little out of place?” She seemed to tremble, glossy with snowmelt, expectant. Charlie did his best to keep his own face blank. Never let them see you bleed, Grandpa had said, before disappearing into a DC-10 a week after the shiva.

Meanwhile, something like pity, a Where are your parents? look, had slipped the bouncer’s jovial mask. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I’ve been on since eight, and, like I said, I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“Charlie,” she said, “can you just hang here with Bullet for a sec while I go in and check on something?” So he waited, shifting from foot to foot, trying to edge away from the bouncer. Pigeons brooded on the streetlight’s bent neck. A person dressed like a mime, only needing no makeup to chalk her face, blundered out of the door and fell on the icy sidewalk. She laughed and laughed, and Charlie wanted to go to her, but no one else moved. The bouncer shrugged, as if to say, What are you going to do?

Which, what was he? That Bicentennial summer, the summer of Sam, had arrived like a glass-blue wave, picking up his godforsaken life in one steep rake and thrusting it forward at such an angle he’d had to look up to see the shore. But as all waves must, it had broken, and anyway, he’d always been scared of heights. He’d seen her once afterward, from the passenger’s side of the station wagon his mom would no longer let him drive. She was sitting at a bus stop in Manhasset. And maybe she’d seen him, but something in him had held back, and something had held her back, too — the part of her he now saw had stayed out here, riding a redoubled wave, testing the city to see if it was strong enough for her. Be cool, he told himself. Just be cool.

“Charlie, listen to me,” Sam said, when she re-emerged. “If it turned out I had to run uptown, would you be all right on your own for an hour?”

He would have done anything for her, of course. He would have missed Ex Post Facto, if she wanted, or whatever they were calling themselves these days. But what happened when what she wanted was for him to do nothing? “What the fuck, Sam? I thought you wanted to spend New Year’s with me. ”

“I do, but I’m going to feel like absolute shit if you miss the first set, and I just … there’s a problem here I can’t put off any longer.” Beyond the baffle of the warehouse wall, a struck drum signaled a shift from recorded music to live. “It’s starting. You’ll be okay?” She turned to the bouncer. “Bullet, can you look after Charlie here?”

“He can’t look after himself? Charlie feeble-minded or something?”

“This is fucked up,” Charlie said, to no one in particular.

“Bullet—”

The bouncer reached out and, pincering his massive thumb and forefinger, lifted the brim of Grandpa’s hat so Charlie could see his eyes. “You know I’m just playing with you, boss.”

Charlie froze him out, focused on Sam. “What happened to ‘I need you, Charlie’?”

“I do need you, Charlie. I’m going to need you. Look, if I’m not back by eleven, come and find me. You can meet me at a quarter to twelve on the benches by the 72nd Street IND station. You know where that is?”

“Of course I know where it is.” He had no idea where it was.

“Either way, I swear, we’ll ring it in together.” The flat of her hand between his earflap and cheek was like a cold pool on a hot day. Then she walked away backward, and for the first time since the LIRR platform, she seemed to actually see him. Despite the secrets she was plainly still keeping, he wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe it was possible for this wild free creature to need him. But she was gone. The bouncer, Bullet, swept open the door. Charlie thought of a car with open doors rolling through the parking lot at school, surging out of reach even as voices from within said, Come on, Weisbarger. Hop in. But that wasn’t real anymore — nor was it real that he’d kissed Sam already, back in the basement of that weird house on East Third Street all those months ago. What was real, in the vacuum she’d left, was the memory of her skin on his skin and the music now blasting from the maw of the club.